South Korea's AI Bubble Just Popped - Now What?

Imagine getting a text message that wipes out your whole net worth. You check your trading app, you pray for a glitch, but it's not a glitch. Your life savings are actually gone. The truth is actually worse than zero because now you owe the bank a fortune. That exact nightmare just hit 300,000 young Korean

investors. They didn't just lose cash on a single bad trade, but an automated system basically forcibly liquidated all of their accounts. >> Yeah, abundance expression, right? There's a bit of soul searching out in Korea. >> This machine run on AI hype plus heavy debt. The South Korean stock market completely breaking led to a quarter of

a trillion dollars wiped out [music] in days. >> On Monday, the KOSPI plunged to close at the 6,500 level. The main KOSPI opened lower and plunged more than 4% closing at 6,516.27. >> After that, that triggered seven consecutive market circuit breakers. This is not a normal crash. The culprit were leveraged funds and a lot of

desperate young people providing the fuel. And now what's going on with the Korean stock market is now setting shockwaves through the US.

So, South Korea is a global manufacturing powerhouse, but in early 2026, the stock market changed because the entire financial system then became concentrated and focused and obsessed with artificial intelligence. We all know that these new AI models require a lot of computing power and that power relies heavily on memory, specifically HBM or high bandwidth memory chips. So,

there's a company in Korea called SK Hynix that controls roughly half of this global market. >> [music] >> They hold a near monopoly alongside Samsung Electronics. So, trillions of Korean won flooded directly into these two companies and by June of 2026, these two companies made up half of the Korean stock exchange, the KOSPI index